earn $100 and reduce the Emacs TODO list

earn $100 and reduce the Emacs TODO list

[Colin Walters]

One feature I've been wanting to see in Emacs for quite a while is
support for the new XRender extension for XFree86.  This would allow us
to have antialiased fonts under X.  Given how much time I spend working
in Emacs, this would be a big win, I think.

I've added it to etc/TODO, but I am so interested in seeing this feature
that I am willing to ask the FSF to give my yearly donation of $100 for
this year to whoever implements this feature.  It may not be a large
amount, but hopefully it will help motivate someone to do it.

Re: earn $100 and reduce the Emacs TODO list

[Stefan Monnier]

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> One feature I've been wanting to see in Emacs for quite a while is
> support for the new XRender extension for XFree86.  This would allow us
> to have antialiased fonts under X.  Given how much time I spend working
> in Emacs, this would be a big win, I think.
> 
> I've added it to etc/TODO, but I am so interested in seeing this feature
> that I am willing to ask the FSF to give my yearly donation of $100 for
> this year to whoever implements this feature.  It may not be a large
> amount, but hopefully it will help motivate someone to do it.

It shouldn't be too difficult from what I understand (but I don't
understand much of Xlib programming).  For what it's worth I have
appended a quick-hack "anti-aliased fonts for XEmacs" patch posted
to the XEmacs list a while back.


	Stefan


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Re: earn $100 and reduce the Emacs TODO list

[Colin Walters]

On Tue, 2002-05-07 at 20:12, Stefan Monnier wrote:

> It shouldn't be too difficult from what I understand (but I don't
> understand much of Xlib programming).  For what it's worth I have
> appended a quick-hack "anti-aliased fonts for XEmacs" patch posted
> to the XEmacs list a while back.

I will ask Vladimir if he's willing to assign copyright, so his code
could at least be used as a base.  I have a feeling though that this
code will probably be very hard to port to Emacs, since (as I understand
things) we don't have as much of an abstraction layer in our redisplay
backends.

Thanks for pointing out the existence of this code, though.

Re: earn $100 and reduce the Emacs TODO list

[Stefan Monnier]

> > It shouldn't be too difficult from what I understand (but I don't
> > understand much of Xlib programming).  For what it's worth I have
> > appended a quick-hack "anti-aliased fonts for XEmacs" patch posted
> > to the XEmacs list a while back.
> 
> I will ask Vladimir if he's willing to assign copyright, so his code
> could at least be used as a base.

I don't think it's worth it to use his code as a base.
It's just to give Xlib programmers unfamiliar with XRender and/or with
the Emacs redisplay engine some idea of where to start looking
to implement the hack.


	Stefan

Re: earn $100 and reduce the Emacs TODO list

[Richard Stallman]

Please think twice before posting XEmacs code here unless you have
checked first for legal papers.  If we can't get papers for it, we
would have to consciously ensure our code is not similar, and that
could be a lot of extra work.

Re: earn $100 and reduce the Emacs TODO list

[Kevin A. Burton]

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Colin Walters <walters@gnu.org> writes:
<snip/>

> I've added it to etc/TODO, but I am so interested in seeing this feature
> that I am willing to ask the FSF to give my yearly donation of $100 for
> this year to whoever implements this feature.  It may not be a large
> amount, but hopefully it will help motivate someone to do it.
<snip/>

$100 ?!

I thought this was all Free Software!?

;)

PS.

That was a joke... laugh...

Kevin

- -- 
Kevin A. Burton ( burton@apache.org, burton@openprivacy.org, burtonator@acm.org )
             Location - San Francisco, CA, Cell - 415.595.9965
        Jabber - burtonator@jabber.org,  Web - http://relativity.yi.org/

In a weak sense, it (windows NT) is a form of Unix. -- Bill Gates, 1996
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Re: earn $100 and reduce the Emacs TODO list

[Richard Stallman]

    I've added it to etc/TODO, but I am so interested in seeing this feature
    that I am willing to ask the FSF to give my yearly donation of $100 for
    this year to whoever implements this feature.

It would be too hard for us to accept a small donation with
conditions.  If you were donating $10,000, we could work out with you
what project it should be spent on and how.  For $100, though, we just
can't afford to keep track.

As for the XRender feature, I don't know what that does.
I guess the main question is, how much change is required?

Re: earn $100 and reduce the Emacs TODO list

[Colin Walters]

On Wed, 2002-05-08 at 09:58, Richard Stallman wrote:
> It would be too hard for us to accept a small donation with
> conditions.  If you were donating $10,000, we could work out with you
> what project it should be spent on and how.  For $100, though, we just
> can't afford to keep track.

Ok, that's too bad.  No big deal, though.

> As for the XRender feature, I don't know what that does.

Well, XRender is a different rendering model for X, with different API. 
Why we want it is it automatically renders text using FreeType, which
supports text antialiasing (i.e. softening jagged edges in text).  Here
is a screenshot of XEmacs using XRender:

http://www.intrepid.com/~vladimir/xemacs_aa.png

The XRender "homepage" as such is here:

http://www.eax.com/render/

Since more and more free software applications are supporting XRender
(Mozilla/Galeon, and all of GNOME2), I've rather gotten used to it, and
having it in Emacs would be great.

> I guess the main question is, how much change is required?

A fair amount, as far as I can tell.  A lot of the code in xfaces.c,
particuarly, would have to be touched, I think.  This isn't at the top
of my TODO list, but I'll probably work on it in my spare time, since it
might be fun to learn Xlib (or maybe not :) )...